The Gospel of Hate: Joel Webbon and the ‘TheoBros’ Assault on Reason, Rights, and Pluralism

The ‘TheoBros’ are a loose but influential American subculture of young, digitally fluent men drawn to aggressive masculinist Christian nationalism - and antisemitic, racist and women-hating conspiracy theories.

Emerging from ultra-conservative protestant Reformed church circles in the 2010s, the self-styled ‘Theobros’ champion ‘biblical masculinity’, postmillennial optimism, and a rejection of liberal democracy, feminism, and religious pluralism. Their vision is a reconstructed Christian society governed by patriarchal authority and scriptural law. Their retrograde message, relayed by many in MAGA-Trump world, is delivered through podcasts, memes, and divisive social media content that resonates with increasing numbers of young men alienated by modern cultural shifts.

At the center stands hate preacher Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). Widely regarded as the movement’s unofficial patriarch or ‘grandpa’, Wilson has shaped the TheoBros through his writings on classical Christian education, family authority, and cultural engagement. He promotes a male hierarchical  view of gender relations in which wives submit to their husbands, women are largely excluded from public leadership, and masculinity is defined by dominance and protection. Wilson’s influence extends to politics; he has ties to figures like Pete Hegseth – current U.S. Secretary of Defense - and has long advocated for a distinctly Christian public square. From a democratic perspective, Wilson and the TheoBros embody a reactionary threat to individual rights and democratic governance.

Wilson’s co-authored booklet Southern Slavery As It Was notoriously romanticized antebellum slavery as a harmonious, biblically sanctioned institution — a claim thoroughly debunked by historians as selective myth-making that erases systemic violence and exploitation. Such revisionism aligns with broader patterns in the movement: skepticism toward mainstream history, science, and democratic norms in favor of ancient textual literalism.

Joel Webbon and the radical rejection of Enlightenment values

While Wilson maintains some rhetorical distance from the most extreme antisemitism seen in protégés like Joel Webbon (with whom he split), the broader ecosystem fosters authoritarian tendencies — calls to limit religious liberty for non-Christians, roll back women’s rights, and replace pluralism with theocratic order. This fusion of Calvinist theology and nationalist grievance offers identity and certainty to followers but undermines core democratic values: equal dignity, empirical reasoning, gender equality, and open society. The TheoBros highlight how online radicalization can revive pre-Enlightenment hierarchies under the banner of tradition.

Webbon, pastor of Covenant Bible Church in Texas and founder of Right Response Ministries, represents a particularly aggressive and viral strain within the TheoBros movement. Webbon’s project is not just a theological dispute but a dangerous ideological regression: an explicit rejection of Enlightenment values — individual rights, evidence-based reasoning, democratic pluralism, gender equality, and universal human dignity — in favor of authoritarian hierarchy, historical denialism, and conspiracy-minded supernatural fantasy.

His rhetoric, optimized for social media outrage algorithms, promotes a worldview that undermines human flourishing, threatens civil liberties, and fosters division along lines of gender, race, and religion. Webbon’s growing influence among disaffected young men highlights real cultural anxieties — family breakdown, secular alienation, demographic shifts — but channels them into a toxic politics of resentment and domination rather than constructive, rational solutions. His statements on women, race, Jews, governance, and history consistently prioritize selected ancient texts over empirical evidence, empathy, and modern ethical standards developed through reason and human experience.

Webbon openly advocates abolishing women’s suffrage and rolling back feminist gains. Women, in his framework, must submit “unquestionably” to husbands in all things, treated essentially as property under male authority. He denigrates modern women as “dumb, wicked, vile whores” and dismisses contemporary society and Christianity as overly “feminine” and weak. He calls for restoring “biblical masculinity” centered on dominance and control, and is unabashed in his misogyny and direct attacks on hard-won gender equality. It is a reactionary bid to reverse social progress in the name of ancient patriarchal norms.

In his theological/political vision Webbon reserves special hostility for Jews and Judaism. He promotes the antisemitic conspiracy of extreme replacement ‘theology’ - labeling rabbinical Judaism a “synagogue of Satan,” a subversive perversion, and source of occult influence via the Talmud and Kabbalah. In tracts like The Hyphenated Heresy, he rejects “Judeo-Christian” civilization as heretical. He spreads tropes about Jewish overrepresentation in the slave trade, Bolshevism, finance (Rothschilds engineering dispensationalism), and cultural subversion. He has linked Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes to Talmudic ethics and echoes blood libel-adjacent ideas of ritual perversion.

Backing “everything that Hitler did that was biblical”

Particularly egregious is Webbon’s promotion of ‘Holocaustianity’ — framing Holocaust remembrance as a manipulative “false religion” and idol that guilt-trips white Christians and shields Jewish interests. Webbon has claimed the Holocaust was “probably not as bad as we’ve been told,” guessed death tolls at 1-2 million rather than 6 million, suggested Hitler may not have known the full extent, expressed sympathy for Nazi book burnings of Jewish intellectuals like Freud, and stated he supports “everything that Hitler did that was biblical” while calling for “humanizing” him. He associates with overt Holocaust deniers like Nick Fuentes and E. Michael Jones and dismisses “antisemitism” as a fabricated tool of control.

Holocaust denial and minimization are a long shot from legitimate historical skepticism; they contradict an overwhelming body of evidence from Nazi records, Allied liberations, survivor testimonies, demographic studies, and trials like Nuremberg. Such denialism dishonors victims, trivializes one of history’s greatest crimes, and often serves as a gateway to broader antisemitic conspiracy thinking reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is irrational scapegoating that violates principles of truth-seeking and human dignity. Jews, like all groups, are individuals entitled to equal rights, not collective targets for theological or ethnic vendettas. Webbon’s pattern recycles centuries-old prejudices that fueled pogroms and genocide, posing real risks in a world where antisemitic incidents are on the rise.

As an important part of his theocratic campaign Webbon envisions amending the Constitution with Christian creeds, barring non-Protestants (Jews, Muslims, Catholics) from public office, closing synagogues and mosques, and establishing a Protestant-dominated order. Government should “terrorize” enemies so they have “nightmares,” reward Christian allies, and enforce biblical penalties — including public execution for false rape accusations to dismantle #MeToo. He has declared America needs “more racism” to counter “toxic empathy” and prevent ‘white genocide’, a racist and antisemitic white supremacist conspiracy theory, and in September 2025 tweeted that “Christians must learn to hate again.”

This is naked authoritarianism incompatible with liberal democracy, secular governance, and human rights. The First Amendment’s protections for speech, religion, and assembly — born from centuries of religious wars and persecution — prevent exactly the kind of state-enforced orthodoxy Webbon craves. Theocratic systems historically produce tyranny, corruption, and stagnation by subordinating individual conscience to clerical or political power. Secularism champions separation of church and state to protect pluralism and freedom of thought. Calls to “terrorize” dissidents and abolish rights for women and minorities echo fascist tendencies more than enlightened governance. Democracy’s strength lies in accountability, checks and balances, and protection of minorities — not submission to any single religious vision.

Webbon’s worldview rests on young-earth creationism, a literal reading of Genesis, Nephilim as historical angel-human giant hybrids, active demons possessing people (including, he has suggested, Donald Trump via Paula White, whom he calls a “witch”), and ghosts as demonic deceptions. He interprets global myths as distorted memories of pre-Flood supernatural events. Enlightened people reject this as pre-scientific mythology contradicted by overwhelming evidence from cosmology, geology, biology, genetics, and archaeology. The universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old; Earth is about 4.5 billion years old; life evolved through natural processes over billions of years. Claims of literal giants, recent creation, and demonic possession fail every empirical test and rely on unfalsifiable supernatural assertions. Promoting such views discourages critical thinking and scientific literacy essential for addressing real challenges like climate change, disease, and technological ethics. It fosters a conspiratorial mindset where evidence yields to dogma.

Peddling conspiracies about Black people and slavery

Like his mentor Doug Wilson, Webbon has described antebellum Southern slavery as a “blessing” for Black people, arguing it brought Christianity, medicine, and superior living standards compared to African societies. He suggests Black Americans should feel gratitude toward former white masters and has advised white parents to warn children that groups of Black strangers are “30 times more dangerous,” relying on a very selective use of crime statistics. He praises Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson while echoing revisionist claims that downplay the brutality of chattel slavery. These positions are empirically indefensible and ethically bankrupt.

The transatlantic slave trade and American chattel slavery involved systemic violence, family destruction, rape, and dehumanization on a massive scale — facts attested by countless primary sources, survivor accounts, economic records, and archaeological evidence. Romanticizing it as “providential” or beneficial ignores this reality and perpetuates racial stereotypes. Crime statistics, when properly contextualized, reflect complex socioeconomic, cultural, and historical factors (including legacies of discrimination and family structure disruptions), not inherent racial traits. Democrats reject this race-based fearmongering and collective guilt or gratitude narratives; individuals deserve equal rights and judgment by character and actions, not ancestry. Webbon’s rhetoric fosters division and justifies unequal treatment, contradicting evidence-based approaches to social issues that prioritize education, economic opportunity, and criminal justice reform.

Webbon and aligned TheoBros exploit legitimate frustrations with modernity — declining social cohesion, elite disconnect, cultural rapid change — but offer regressive, evidence-free solutions rooted in resentment rather than reason. Their ideology harms human flourishing by undermining women’s autonomy and equality, perpetuating racial fear and pseudohistory, and fueling antisemitic conspiracism that endangers lives.

History shows where such movements lead: increased violence, eroded rights, and societal fracture. The 20th century’s horrors — fascism, totalitarianism, genocide — were enabled by similar cults of authority, myth-making, and dehumanization of out-groups. Webbon’s “gospel of hate” is a symptom of deeper cultural struggles. It represents a retreat from modernity’s gains into authoritarian fantasy. Defending secular democracy, evidence-based discourse, and equal dignity requires clear-eyed criticism of such figures — not out of hostility to religion per se, but in defense of a shared world where reason, compassion, and liberty prevail over dogma, dominance, and division. The alternative is a darker, more tribal future that history warns us against.